Let’s just say hockey’s patriarchal news cycle emerged unscathed. What might have been, in theory, a stiff challenge to the status quo left barely a dent.
Not really a surprise, right? The NHL has been around since 1917, has 32 teams and a large TV contract in both Canada and the United States. So when the NHL’s member clubs lavished tens of millions of dollars on one average player after another over the course of the first few days of free agency, it generated headlines everywhere.
The competitive tectonic plates of the top league in men’s professional hockey didn’t budge. It was more like dozens of non-impact players making a bunch of money for one of the 32 teams convincing one of the other teams to pay them.
There was massive coverage in newspapers, on television, on radio, on podcasts and through social media for all of this.
All women’s hockey did, by contrast, was make history with the announcement of a new, united pro league.
For that, the inside pages of most sports sections and a brief broadcast mention was enough. There was some limited social media chatter.
The discrepancy between the attention lavished on men’s and women’s pro hockey could not have been more striking. Indeed, had the news been the emergence of a rival men’s pro league, something like the long dormant World Hockey Association, or perhaps the LIV Hockey League backed by the Saudi royal family’s money, it would have been treated as a much more important news event.
Do we know why this patriarchy still exists? Of course we do. It’s about money, and it’s about the way in which women’s pro sports have long been perceived in the North American sports culture.
It’s slowly changing. Marie-Philip Poulin became the first female pro hockey player to win The Northern Star Award as Canada’s athlete of the year in 2022. Both of the country’s top sports television networks now regularly use female analysts for the NHL.
Canada’s top pro tennis event, the Rogers Cup, has announced pay equity between men and women this year for the first time. Female pro golfers, including seven months pregnant Amy Olson, are playing their U.S. Open at legendary Pebble Beach for the first time this week. The upcoming 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup is almost certainly going to be a transformative event.
We even had the first female athlete detected to have been suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) this week. A former Aussie rules football player was diagnosed with the degenerative brain disease. She died last November.
Sadly, if that’s not catching up with the men, what is?
In the midst of all of this, the groundbreaking and historic news that all the interests in women’s pro hockey will finally coalesce into one new league broke.
“This is probably the most pivotal moment in the sport that we’ve really ever had,” Canadian star forward Sarah Nurse told The Canadian Press.
We’re still sorting out exactly what it means. There’s a good deal of confusion. Unfortunately, some jobs will be lost. It must have felt the same in the early years of the 20th century when the NHL emerged out of the embers of pro leagues like the International Professional Hockey League and the National Hockey Association. Even after the NHL was formed, it competed for the Stanley Cup for a few years with the Professional Canadian Hockey Association and the Western Canadian Hockey League.
We’re at a similar point with the evolution of women’s hockey, it appears. The end of the beginning, as it were.
The Premier Hockey League, which included the Toronto Six, was bought out by a group of investors that backed a new, united pro league. The Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association, meanwhile, ratified a collective bargaining agreement with the new league’s owners Sunday. The new league will have six teams, salaries ranging from $35,000 to $80,000 (U.S.) and benefits.
“It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen in women’s hockey,” said former Canadian national team star Jayna Hefford.
It’s huge. A game-changer. So why didn’t it generate the same headlines as Ryan Reaves signing with the Leafs?
Great question. There’s certainly no shortage of male sports fans who will loudly declare that “nobody cares” about women’s hockey and women’s sports. News organizations spend a lot of money researching what their customers are interested in. The clicks tell all.
Still, on one hand you have history being made, and on the other hand, essentially business as usual. None of the top 75 NHL scorers changed teams in free agency.
It certainly seems acutely unbalanced. Those waiting for this massive development in women’s hockey might have been left second-guessing themselves when what they believed to be major news event was delivered by media as secondary.
Of course, change comes slowly, and recognition of that change in established news organizations comes even more slowly. Back in 1973, for example, news that the Maple Leafs had signed Börje Salming, who would become the first European superstar in NHL history, was treated as trivial. In this newspaper, the news was contained in a tiny story carried on the same back page of the sports section as the racing results.
How news decisions are made these days in pro sports has as much to do with broadcast rights as actual news value. The best example might be how TSN owns the rights to the Canadian Football League and treats the CFL as major news, while Sportsnet carries no games and essentially pretends the league doesn’t exist.
So the way in which big news in women’s pro hockey was widely reported this week isn’t really a complaint. It’s more of a snapshot of where we are as a sports media culture.
Women’s pro sports are growing like gangbusters and at a much greater rate than men’s sports. That’s news. It’s probably time we started getting our heads around that.
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